About Gerard V. Bradley

Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School and a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, where he is the Director of the Center on Religion and the Constitution. Professor Bradley sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

It is time to refocus President Trump’s attention upon Common Core and persuade him to ignite a national movement to roll it back. Catholic education, in particular, is undermined by adopting these national standards.

In her landmark 1971 paper, Judith Jarvis Thomson tried to defend abortion by appeal to norms of justification consistently applicable in a range of other cases. By contrast, the courts in and after Roe and Casey have treated the right to abortion as an unquestionable legal principle. This inverted approach is doomed to fail as it continues to reveal the anomalous character of abortion rights.

In our emerging legal climate, Christians are to be admired for their dedication to moral principle, and they are welcome to act in accordance with it at home and at church. But once they venture into public, our new legal overlords tell us, they must act according to a different set of norms.

It is morally indefensible for Catholic institutions to recognize and incentivize same-sex marriages by extending marriage benefits to employees who declare themselves legally married to a person of the same sex.

US religious liberty law is not perfect, but it still deserves our support. Religious exemptions witness to the value of religion as a transcendent good. And nothing in the Supreme Court cases requesting religious liberty exemptions for Muslim citizens undermines that effort.

The pro-life movement has won a great battle by convincing the American public that an unborn child is a person. But that is not enough. Now, we must make an ethical argument against the horrific injustice of abortion.

The age in which all states were united in understanding marriage as the exclusive union of man and woman for life has passed away. Now, new legislation seeks to protect the right of each state to define marriage for those who reside within its borders.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act would equate sexual orientation and gender identity, ambiguous and malleable concepts, with immutable features like race, color, and ethnicity as classes worthy of special legal protection.

The views about faith and religion that President Obama expressed in his Commencement Address at Notre Dame pave the way for his HHS mandate. He would protect the state from the church, not by privatizing faith, but by redefining it.